“Science attacks values. Not directly, since science is no judge of them and must ignore them; but it subverts every one of the mythical ontogenies upon which the animist tradition, from the Australian aborigines to the dialectical materialists, has based morality: values, duties, rights prohibitions… True knowledge is ignorant of values, but it has to be grounded on a value judgement, or rather on an axiomatic value… in order to establish the norm for knowledge, the objectivity principle defines a value; that value is objective knowledge itself… The ethic of knowledge that created the modern world is the only ethic compatible with it, the only one capable, once understood and accepted, of guiding its evolution.”
- Jacques Monod (molecular biologist)
In dialogue with Monod and his conceptions of the modern world and its science, or more readily the nature of knowledge it puts forth, Mary Midgley in her famed book The Myths We Live By offers this critique;
“Not suprisingly, Monod was for a time the favorite author of many scientists. Since what he meant by ‘knowledge’ was exclusively scientific knowledge, his ruling impled that the only value judgements that remained would be ones about whether a proposition in science was true or not
This, however, would not have been a very convenient arrangment for the rest of life. The clash remained, and, as usual, the truth about it was more complicated than it looked… What makes science into something much grander and more interesting than (an immense storage cupbboard of objective facts) is the huge, ever-changing imaginative structure of ideas by which scientists contrive to connect, understand and interpret these facts…. Lovers of physical science can be happy to see it as it is, as one great department of human thought among others which all cooperate in our efforts at understanding the world… We are accustomed to think of myths as the opposite of science. But in fact they are a central part of it: the part that decides its significance in our lives.” (p 4,5)
Myths are not “untrue stories.” Myths are stories rooted in history that seek to name that which is true about the world we observe and experience.
This idea remains just as intuitive 20 years later as the concept of modernity (or modernism), framed as it is against the grand promises of the enlightenemnt, continues to be dragged into the spotlight where it has drawn all manners of observation and criticism regarding the world it has handed us in the wake of its oingoing deconstructing of the age of myth.
As Midgley points out, such a reductionist view of the world is based on a conception of science that cannot accord with the way reality, or our interpretation of reality actually works. This notion, that we are all necessary interpreters of the world science hands us roots this notion of knowledge, or logos, within a conceptual framework that includes science but is not reducible to it. A world reduced to a subject of function or utility can say nothing about itself, and in fact acts as a defeater of subsequent attempts to speak in terms that reach beyond the parameters of function and utility.
We know this inutitively, as to see the world in terms that reach beyond the subject of function and utility is a quality of that function and utility. To observe human function is to recognize that we actively resist reductionist pictures of the world we occupy.
The problem is, the great allure of redefining knowledge in terms of science as a storage cupboard of objective facts is that it hands us the illusion of control. And that control comes when we reduce the world to facts. That it also hands us the subsequent need to uphold illusions of value and meaning in the process is the part we ignore.
More importantly, a proper defintion of knowledge hands us a narrative of human and natural history that undermines the exceptionalism of our modern enterprise, namely through the fact that it reveals a historical reality where myth coexists with science. Indeed, science, a qualitative part of what it means to be human, has been a necessary part of every human society in history. Thus when the enlightnment reconstitutes the idea of knowledge as scientific facts, it hands us a narrative that sees the modern world as more evolved, more aware, more intelligent than the world it sets itself over and against (the world of superstitions). Defining knoweldge through the language and lens of participation critiques the modern world precisely by exposing the lie that knowledge=facts. As though human evolution is all about trading the meaning making parts of our humanity (the old brain) for the vastly superior functionalism of the new brain (see Jeff Hawkins’ A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence).
Another way to put that (in Hawkins’ terms): trading the abstract for the concrete.
The enlightenment has taught us to see that information is true intelligence, while the distraction of the abstractions that bind us to the old brain nature (with all of its appeal to emotional truth) become the thing the new brain is actively working to replace and repress. In Hawkin’s imagery, the new brain is effectively wrapped over top of the old brain for a reason- a veritable symbol and justification of the enlightenment as simply the necessary and natural trajectory towards the central defining facet of this progression- technological advancement. This is, after all, the only thing that scientific facts can hand us.
And yet, as Midgley suggests, this has proved to be a less than convenient arrangment for the rest of life. A world that, the more and more it gets defined in purely scientific terms, finds itself further and further distanced from its ability to even define what a life actually is.
The answer? If Midgley’s thesis holds true, the answer is found, at least in part, in a necessary reenchanting of the world and the human enterprise that inhabits it. The reclamation of that essential part of our humanity that knows through actual, embodied participation in the world. Knowledge that doesn’t seek to control the world but seeks to understand it. This is what it means to obtain knowledge. But this requires us to begin with this one central conceipt- all of us are bound to myths, whether we realize it or not. Myths are necessary to seek any true understanding of this world, precisely because it gives us the necessary language to define it.
The next part of that conversation then becomes the recognition that these myths are represented through narrative, through story. It is the story that we tell about this world, the very world that science hands us, which informs what we see and understand to be true about it. And what is true about the world is what shapes the ways we live in the world. This is the thing the enlightenment deconstructed, and it left a meaning crisis in its wake. A crisis that has been met by people looking for a better story (the whole environmentalist movement is an example).
For me, on the eve of Advent, this is where I find myself reengaging the myth, or the story, of Christianity. I am reminded as we enter what is deemed the beginning of the liturgical year, of the ways this story seeks to explain the world I observe and experience, as all myths do. It is that explanation that I find so persusasive. As Tolkien once said, in a world full of stories (in other words, a world shaped by myth), it is the true myth that makes sense of all the worlds stories. That, it feels to me, is the greatest explanatory power, a myth that doesn’t shut us off from an embodied existence, but one that frees us to enter into the world with all of its abstractions. We do this precisely because it affords us a coherent center for which to make sense of this human need for myth or story- Christ. A place where spirit and flesh meet as an emodied union.
The Stories of my Life 